Babacar M’Bow was appointed by a mayor to be the Museum of Contemporary Art’s director.CreditAngel Valentin for The New York Times

Anyone looking to meet the director of the tiny but highly regarded Museum of Contemporary Art here has two choices. Head into the museum, where its interim director, Alex Gartenfeld, has an office. Or go next door to City Hall, where the mayor’s appointee to the same position, Babacar M’Bow, is essentially working in exile.

The dueling directors are just part of the chaos emanating from a bitter showdown that has erupted between MoCA, as the museum is known, and the city that founded it.

The museum’s board wants to leave this working-class city and merge with the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach, its wealthier and more glamorous neighbor. It says that North Miami has neglected the museum building and failed to support a needed expansion.

City officials, in turn, accuse the board of secretly plotting to make off with North Miami’s cultural patrimony. “The collection belongs to the city, and they are trying to steal it,” Mayor Lucie Tondreau said.

The departure may not resonate on the scale of, say, the Dodgers leaving Brooklyn, but the threatened loss of the city’s only art museum to a flashier oceanside neighbor is producing a sizable dose of rancor here.

Alex Gartenfeld is the museum’s director, according to the institution’s board of trustees.CreditMuseum of Contemporary Art, North Miami

Museum officials say the city has changed the passwords on email accounts. City employees say the museum cut off access to its bank statements. Both sides have filed lawsuits.

Yet the legal wrangling may overshadow the more profound issues that confront this and other cities across the country that are engaged in complicated public-private partnerships.

Who owns a museum? The city that founded it? The community it serves? The donors who helped finance it or the board members entrusted to run it?

The Detroit Institute of Arts, for example, is operated by a nonprofit organization, but its collection, now threatened with the municipal bankruptcy there, is owned by the city. In Vancouver, Wash., the National Park Service, a nonprofit trust and the city battled recently over control of the Pearson Air Museum.

The debate is particularly fraught in South Florida, because of the sometimes tense relationship between North Miami, which has one of the largest concentrations of Haitians in the United States, and Miami Beach, a haven for vacationing billionaires and college students on spring break.

Greater Miami, teeming with galleries, private museums and fairs like Art Basel, has become a global art center. That success, however, has challenged the Museum of Contemporary Art to maintain its international reputation and relevance in the face of “newer, larger and more glamorous institutions, events and exhibitions in the South Florida area,” the board confessed in its lawsuit.

While the Bass Museum is fronted by a blocklong promenade that leads directly to the beach and faces sumptuous hotels, the Museum of Contemporary Art is situated in North Miami’s downtown, near the DaVita Dialysis Center and the Bible Emporium, which sells Creole, French and Spanish translations....Continue Reading

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